Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business

by Lynda Obst

  The great great tentpole squall of May of 2011 was a dramatic—if breathless for those of us with XX chromosomes—example of an in-between movie (one not designed for a summer release date) being tossed into a rough sea of big action movies: Judd Apatow’s female comedy Bridesmaids. It was a movie with no stars to speak of, no preawareness, starring women, and likely to do bupkis abroad. What was the strategy? It was clearly counterprogramming for women. But was it an attempt to throw chick flicks overboard in the week of Thor to prove that women’s movies couldn’t swim with the sharks? It was the kind of summer that featured what I think of as “Man” movies—movies with titles that either contain the word “man” or at least feasibly could: X-Men: First Class, Thor and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; all we were missing was Iron Man and Batman. How were four unknown (outside of television) women going to compete in this company?

  This was the reality Bridesmaids, the unknown chick flick, faced on its May 13 release date. The weekend before, a sister romantic comedy, Kate Hudson’s Something Borrowed, was flattened by the second week of Universal’s Fast Five, the spectacularly successful action franchise about drag racers. It was still racking it up overseas and at home by spicing up its cast with the utterly brilliant addition of the popular action, and former wrestling, star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and it showed no signs of slowing. Thor, opening directly against Bridesmaids, was expected to be a smash. It was tracking through the roof, as we say, expected to open at $60 million. Hiring “Shakespearean” Kenneth Branagh gave this Marvel silliness all the gravitas it needed to track well with what Hollywood marketing likes to call “older men”: men over twenty-four. (Not just women get ageist angst around here.) It was going to bring in every male everywhere and their dates. By opening weekend, Bridesmaids was expected to open with $15 million at the box office at best.

  If it performed as the tracking numbers suggested—between $15 million and $17 million—chicks were done for. Movies in the summer were expected to make $30 to $60 million on opening weekend to compete. Bridesmaids, made for a fraction of the cost of a normal summer movie, wouldn’t have to reach this blockbuster bar. But it couldn’t just fizzle out. How did this potential extinction come to pass? It’s like we all went to sleep one day in Hollywood and woke up living in Tentpole City.

  There is obviously more at stake here than bloody (well, not bloody, unfortunately for sales) chick flicks. The question really was, can the original movie with a good story get made for its own sake in today’s Hollywood, as it could when I started? Could I get The Fisher King made with Terry Gilliam (the phenomenally talented and eccentric director of movies like Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and 12 Monkeys) and the best script I ever had? (Ha! No way!)

  When the late, great producer Laura Ziskin was asked by the Hollywood Reporter which of her great movies before Spider-Man she couldn’t get made now—including the Kevin Costner political thriller No Way Out and Julia Roberts’s seminal breakout hit, Pretty Woman, she answered, “None of them.”

  MOVIES THAT WOULD NEVER GET MADE IN THE NEW ABNORMAL

  (EXCEPT AS TINY INDIES WE WILL CALL “TADPOLES”)

  Field of Dreams

  Pitch: It’s about a guy who builds a baseball field in Iowa to bring back his dead dad. Pass.

  Forrest Gump

  Pitch: A totally stupid, nice guy travels all over the world, selling shrimp and running into famous people as he looks for his screwed-up girlfriend—who is kinda over him, if she was ever into him. Outta here.

  The Fisher King

  Pitch: A homeless man finds redemption for a radio shock jock. Can I get back to you on that? At Sundance?

  Driving Miss Daisy

  Pitch: A happy and wise chauffeur in the South has an endearing relationship with his elderly charge. Exactly how “elderly” are we talking?

  The Big Chill

  Pitch: A reunion of sixties best friends celebrating their dead bestie. So, wait, is it actually set in the sixties?

  The Graduate

  Pitch: A returning college graduate has an affair with the wife of his father’s law partner and runs away with her daughter. Are you French? Or, Um, okay, we’re not making Swedish movies here, unless they’re by Stieg Larsson.

  Moonstruck

  Pitch: An unlucky widow falls in love with her fiancé’s brother. Romantic magic ensues. You lost me at “widow” and nearly killed me at “romantic magic.”

  I could go on, but it just gets increasingly obvious and depressing that the more we love the movie, the less likely it would get made now, at least in the studio system.

  Everything was off-the-charts Abnormal, and we were still trying to play a game that wasn’t playable anymore. It was a weird, changing, Darwinian time. Conditions were changing as fast as I could figure them out, and then would change again. Movies are now an endangered species in the very place that makes them. My son Oly, who now works as a literary manager at 3 Arts, echoed the sentiment: “Making a movie because it’s good is so 2003, Mom.” It struck me that risk taking itself was at stake. Hollywood, a town built by mavericks and rebels and mobsters, risk takers all, had now become utterly risk-averse. The very fact that a broad comedy like Bridesmaids—best friends coping with one’s wedding, accompanied by actual pooping in a sink—had fallen into the category of risk taking was a sign of extreme distress.

  This change in no way seemed temporary. It was strange and difficult in a systemic way that was killing producers and writers who weren’t on the studios’ new, hardwired agenda. When and how did this happen exactly?

  We all knew that the studios had been pleading poverty for a while—since DVD sales had begun collapsing in the wake of the technological changes that brought piracy and Netflix et al. But who really believed their sob stories? They were studios, for crying out loud! If they were so poor, why were they making more wildly expensive movies and fewer of them? It seemed counterintuitive.

  But there they were, right before us, the rules of a New Abnormal that could be easily discerned—a formula that every studio seemed to be following, and one which sometimes worked like gangbusters: The top seven movies in 2011 were all sequels (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2, Transformers 3, Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 1, The Hangover 2, Pirates 4, Fast Five and Cars 2). The model for all of this in the movies was Star Wars,2 from which George Lucas sprung six original movie blockbusters, including sequels, an origin story and sequels to the origin story. Comic-book writers had been doing this for years.

  The studios took the formula and ran with it. They were shooting the moon, and often they hit the target. And when they hit, they hit big. But how and when did they figure all this out? And what, exactly, did they figure out? There seemed to be three key components:

  1. You must have heard of the Title before; it must have preawareness.

  2. It must sell overseas.

  3. It should generate a Franchise and/or Sequel (also a factor of 1 and 2).

  What is the difference between a tentpole and a franchise? A franchise is the point of a tentpole: The first movie must make enough money to justify a sequel. If the sequel performs well enough, then you have another and another and voilà—you have a franchise. One wildly successful version is the aforementioned Fast and the Furious, which didn’t have a famous title to begin with, but has no signs of reducing velocity after five installments. Another is Pirates of the Caribbean—based on a ride at Disneyland and Disneyworld—which is on its fifth iteration. Transformers, based on the alien car toys from Hasbro, has had three big hits at the bat and is still a player. Harry Potter, needless to say, had all the material for its sequels when Warner Bros. bought the property, and is, tragically for Warner Bros., now finito.

  Back in the Old Abnormal, I used to make up movies with my favorite writers and pitch those ideas to the studios. If an idea was funny, fresh and could potentially attract talent (read: stars or A-list director) it could mean a sale. I used to be able to buy a book that had sold un
der a million copies and adapt it to sell to studios just because it had a great story. No more.

  It was clear from talking to peers and executives that much, much more than the chick flick was on the ropes. Comedy was in trouble. It was dire for drama. But above all, it was the movie itself: the original one-off, nonsequel, nonremake, noncomic-book-franchise piece of business. That’s what I have come to realize. This isn’t about self-interest, my changing career, or what I can or can’t get made anymore; this is about an industry that for more than half a century has been the caretaker of an indigenous art form possibly relinquishing responsibility for that art form altogether. Sure, it was always show business, never show art. But now it is business business. More and more, the Oscars are dominated by the independents. The studios seem to wake up once a year, don their finest and collectively remember what they are making isn’t product or money, but film. Then they do a contrite walk of shame in the morning, and have amnesia by lunch. Movies are now an endangered species here.

  The process by which this came to be is the knot that I will attempt to unravel in this book. This is a body-blow-by-body-blow account of what happened here during the past ten years that so fundamentally changed the movie business and where we are headed from here. People I started with in the business, classic producers and writers, look at me and then stare up into the sky. Why is it so different? Why has it become bone-crunchingly hard and so much less fun?

  At least I can pin down one thing. It’s one small step for womankind and the one-off nonsequel movie if Bridesmaids can open in this sea of testosterone and doubting Thomases. And I wasn’t alone in my rooting.

  Everyone in town reads the “tracking reports” like handicappers read the Daily Racing Form, but you should have seen the novice female screenwriters trying to figure out how to interpret the hieroglyphics two weeks before Bridesmaids opened. These daily and weekly reports are done by well-known outside market research firms as well as the marketing departments of the studios, and they are compared and averaged for outliers, similar to election polling. They measure “definite interest” in seeing a movie, “first choice” (i.e., “What do you want to see most this weekend?”) and “awareness” of the movie (“How many of you know it’s out there?”).

  At first Bridesmaids tracked well. Then it seemed to “flatten,” which means it didn’t go up, even though they added TV spots. This stumped everyone. I checked in with my trusted source and colleague, Kevin Goetz, Hollywood’s go-to market research guru in times of crisis.

  Kevin Goetz is a marketing research legend, one of those guys many of us trust with interpreting the numbers and making the wise calls on inside-Hollywood baseball. He’s been with most of the top market research companies, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with him on the research testing of almost all my movies. He is cherubic-looking, well liked and cutting-edge. You want him in the trenches when you need to figure out how to fix your picture or your marketing message, when your tracking—as with Bridesmaids—suddenly stalls out.

  As I drove to work Thursday of opening week, I called Kevin: “So, Kev, how’s Bridesmaids going to do this weekend?”

  “Looks like it could be as low as fifteen. Could go high teens, if it picks up some big buzz from word of mouth. They came on strong but then they stalled, and nothing seems to be happening right now.”

  This is what all the prognosticators were saying.

  “Nothing?” I asked, then added, “Call me if you see any buzz picking up as we get closer.” God only knows what prevented me from bumping into the car in front of me. All the buzz was the same—and it wasn’t good.

  In Hollywood, “buzz” is a semitechnical term that means “everyone is talking about this.” It can result from a multitude of things: word of mouth, great reviews, sudden media attention, a spike in tracking or an amazing television spot that clicks with the audience. There can also be bad buzz, but that’s another thing: Everyone was saying that John Carter—the sci-fi fantasy flop—would be terrible months before anyone had seen a frame. Gigli—starring then couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez—provoked barely suppressed giggles around the globe even before it opened to no business whatsoever. That is bad buzz.

  But good buzz is hard to predict and hard to generate, especially in a noisy summer market full of highly expensive advertising. Who knew what the buzz on Bridesmaids would be? It would have to be money to compete against the oncoming thunderous Thor.

  My gal pals and I were placing wagers and consulting fortune-tellers and doing our own preawareness grassroots marketing. On the night the movie opened, I organized a small army with my dear girlfriend screenwriter Kiwi Smith (Legally Blonde). If I’m defined by Hello, He Lied because the title of my last book displays my cynicism, she’s defined as “Kiwi Loves You” because her Twitter handle shows her refusal to see the dark side. We’re a good team. Curly haired, slightly haywire, yet seductive to every gender, Kiwi is an ardent cheerleader for girl power.

  Kiwi sent a rallying message to her entire email list that was so infectious, I sent it to my buddy Rebecca Traister at Salon.com, where it then did its social-networking proliferating thing. Kiwi was already a mentor and cottage industry to many young writers, and the thousands on her list reached out to their thousands to help us create a little femme-movie-ment. We convened a concerned (read “panicked”) group of female writers, studio execs and actresses to meet first for dinner and drinks and then head to the ArcLight Hollywood theater on Sunset Boulevard, where we would meet with, we hoped, a larger group of female industry friends. Over dinner, texts were flying in from Kristen Wiig’s manager that the matinees on the East Coast were “way overperforming expectations!” She knew that her client’s life was about to change. At that point, Kristen was known nationally as part of the Saturday Night Live ensemble, but opening a movie would transform her career. Some of us veterans knew that overperforming matinees meant Friday night would be even better, Saturday more so. We started to throw back tequilas.

  A gaggle of us, now tipsy, padded into the lobby, greeting flocks of other women and girls, until we found ourselves in a theater filled with—hallelujah, is this happening?!—“event-movie” electricity. Amid the raucous groups of girls (apparently we weren’t the only ones who had this “get drunk with your GFs and go see Bridesmaids” idea) were an amazing number of guys—almost half the theater. In delighted shock, we smiled and waved to them. “We love you, Bridesmaids guys!”

  By Monday morning (May 17, 2011) the number was $24.5 million, $10 million more than was predicted. The fact that the numbers kept going up over the weekend meant that the word of mouth was great. Women had a hit. We claimed this as ours. We gave thanks that night that a genre had possibly survived.

  This meant something big.

  When an inexpensive ($32.5 million) original movie starring barely known women from television, whose stillborn death was predicted by all, survives and has legs in the hostile concrete jungle of noisy sequels and reboots, it is a cause célèbre. We felt this way about The Help, The Town, The Fighter and Black Swan, and about Argo and The Silver Linings Playbook this past year. We just want more original movies made because they are good. Because they are funny or smart and are being made by talented people. Where are they? Why are they so rare?

  Why do movies like the first Hangover and Bridesmaids so surprise the studios? They are both classic high-concept ideas, which was the coin of the realm of the Old Abnormal. The Hangover is about four best friends at a bachelor party who get wasted and lost in Las Vegas and wake up in a hotel room with Mike Tyson’s tiger and no groom. They have to find him and get him back in time for his wedding. It was something that would have sold in a comedy pitch by two writers in baseball caps. But now, in the New Abnormal, these movies that get made for under $40 million with no stars are the counterexamples, what the industry calls “lightning in a bottle.” When they work, it seems like magic. But it’s not magic. These writer-created original movies are simply funny. Finding
them requires judgment, intensive script development, discerning writer and director choices and good casting—craft, in other words. Then unknown, the stars of The Hangover were paid under a million dollars for the first movie. Now each star can get a movie green-lit on his own and is getting $15 million for The Hangover Part III.

  On the Monday morning after the astonishing first weekend of Bridesmaids (Hangover’s twin sister—four unknown women in a high-concept comedy), everybody was knocked on their collective asses, and as is common with paradigm shifts, many things happened.

  The first thing that happened was that Kristen Wiig became a star.

  Second, Melissa McCarthy, of CBS’s Mike and Molly, who gave a breakout performance in the movie, became its second new star and is now toplining comedies.

  Third, chick flicks were getting a second look all over town.

  Fourth, 50,000 R-rated female buddy comedies showed up on managers’ desks. However, it was a temporary reprieve. Much to our consternation, it did not presage a resurgence of chick flicks, romantic comedies, or even four-women buddy comedies. The success seemed to affect only the stars.

  When an original comedy like The Hangover, a great idea with no preawareness and no huge stars, works so well—becoming a wildly successful sleeper hit that then spawns a sequel and perhaps a franchise—it could create a model that allows for other ideas like Bridesmaids to get made. And then movies like Bridesmaids allow for crazy, funny, broad movies to get a second look. I went to discuss this thought with pal Kevin Goetz, who had warned me of the industry’s low expectations for the opening weekend of Bridesmaids.

  We sat down to lunch at the South Beverly Grill, which has the best crab cakes in town. I wanted to razz him a little about Bridesmaids, but I also wanted the benefit of his insight. “Why do you think Bridesmaids overperformed? Don’t you think it reflects a hunger for originals out there?”

  “I think there was some late word of mouth on the picture that the tracking never picked up.”